IE like Crypto AG:
In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.
Probably various VPNs on the market
Especially Israeli owned VPNs. Which seems to be most of them lately.
Oh yeah definitely
Especially the ones aggressively marketed, or noted as independent when they cannot give concrete evidence for whence their finances and ownership come. Always question and investigate, and make sure trusted people know you do so.
I always assume the more popular it is, the more likely it is of being compromised.
I have no idea if it’s the case, but I switched away from mullvad after seeing billboards and ads of it everywhere, even on city infrastructure like trains and buses.
if it makes you feel better i know an employee there and theyre a communist and say a lot of mullvad employees are lefties too, idk if they have a union or anything. nym vpn has chelsea manning backing it. not really a traditional vpn though its basically unfree tor that is not slow as balls, has the benefit of really good server coverage and few people blocking it. coolest thing is you can use a seedbox to route traffic to pay it down.
Mullvad is very likely one of the few good ones. I’d suggest reevaluating it.
My trust in them was definitely shaken after the recent news about fingerprinting exit IPs: https://tmctmt.com/posts/mullvad-exit-ips-as-a-fingerprinting-vector/
They were very responsive but this seemed like a huge fuck-up to me, to the extent that I question whether it was purposeful.
Not sure who else to trust because other providers like Proton seem even worse
If the company is owned by “Kape” its ikely a Israeli honeypot:
https://medium.com/illumination/vpns-the-privacy-trap-4aef67f39634
Most people only use vpn providers for streaming location hopping, torrenting, p*rn and on public networks. For day to day 24/7 use you are just trusting your VPN provider not to spy on your traffic instead of your ISP.